Anthropocene: an insightful or self-absorbed concept?
When thinking about Walking with the Land’s central theme of “relationship with the Earth”, I really do mean relating with the Earth itself, with the planet, as a whole. This perspective is linked to my passion for geology. The study of rocks may seem like a dry, fairly academic subject to most people, but to me it is a conversation with the planet we call home. The rocks we live on tell us a story about where our land has come from, all the way from deep, deep time. Most importantly, geology has enabled me to gain a sense of perspective: of my place on this planet and of the transient nature of human civilisation when compared to the scale of Earth’s history. Our understanding of our place on Earth, through the use of the word “Anthropocene”, is the theme of this blog. Is it a helpful term or yet another sign of our self-absorption?
The term “Anthropocene” is cropping up more and more in everyday language. I come across it frequently: in the media, in conversations and at events I attend. It is a word that provokes a range of emotions within me. Initially, I was intrigued that a term based on the scientific classification of the planet’s chronology was making its way into the common parlance. Then I found that the word frustrated me. It felt, well, anthropocentric. Naming a period of the Earth’s history the Anthropocene after “anthropos” - meaning “man” in ancient Greek - seemed like yet another way in which we humans were claiming ownership over time and space around us. My geologist sensibilities were offended by the human appropriation of the unfathomably huge timescales of our planet’s and universe’s evolution.
The Anthropocene describes a new epoch in Earth’s history, one where humans’ influence has started having a marked and irreversible impact on the Earth’s systems and environment. As the Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnasson said in a podcast advertising his latest book, On Time and Water:
“the Earth’s mightiest forces have forsaken geological time and now change on a human scale”
As I developed my understanding of the scale on which humans are having an impact on the planet, so did my feelings around the concept of the Anthropocene evolve.
This is when I started feeling appalled, even angry. How can we humans be so disruptive and chaotic as to be upsetting the Earth’s intricate balances, built up over billions of years? Humans have been around for several million years, Homo Sapiens for only 0.3 million years. In contrast, the Earth is 4,550 million years old so humans have existed only for 0.05% of its history! The composition of the atmosphere’s gases, which enable us to breathe and grow the food we need for survival, has been slowly evolving for billions of years. Yet we now spew gases out into the atmosphere at a rate so great that the planet can’t keep up anymore. As a result we are disrupting the careful balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen that has enabled complex life to thrive on this planet. Surely, it is obvious that our current pollution of the atmosphere, and the accompanying destruction of so many natural habitats, is foolhardy beyond belief? We are unleashing forces that will take the Earth millions of years to counterbalance. It is my belief that if we keep obstinately thinking that humans alone can fix this problem, we have not the faintest chance of doing so, no matter the amount of technology or goodwill we throw at it.
Many of the conversations I have with people about geology revolve around the impossibly huge dates of the Earth’s history and immense timescales over which geological events take place. We talk in millions and billions of years which often seems inaccessible to people. I wonder whether our society’s inability to engage with the scale and urgency of the ecological crisis is linked to our incapacity to comprehend the fact that geological time is being condensed into a human timescale. How can processes that have taken millions of years to form all of a sudden be happening on the scale of centuries and decades? How can we, mere two-legged creatures going about our everyday life, be contributing (or causing) to these massive changes? Returning to Magnasson, this is precisely why he chose to name his book the way he did: to focus our human minds on familiar and commonplace elements (time and water) rather than the abstract and seemingly distant notion of climate change.
The language we use is so important. If we overcomplicate matters by using technical terms, we risk leaving people behind in the discussion. I’m an advocate for simplifying and democratising language whenever possible. I also recognise that there isn’t only one way to say things but that varied perspectives and forms of expression provide a richer understanding. In this sense, the term “Anthropocene” sits at an interesting cross-section. It is a piece of scientific jargon that could run the risk of not meaning anything to most people. But by merging the human with the immensity of the planet’s timescales, perhaps it is a term that can help bridge a gap between our existence on this planet and the huge scale of the issues we are facing.